Sunrun is an innovative company that allows house owners to install solar panels to produce electric energy, without having to front up the costs of installation or even understand the technology in detail. Edward Fenster, co-CEO of Sunrun, describes how government intervention is solicited by the incumbents to keep any emerging competition at bay. Here is the article: “How Big Power Companies Are Trying To Quash The Disownership Economy”

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That situation, it seems, is by no means restricted to the USA. A recent example in Europe is Spain. Ealier this year, the government cut solar subsidies and put a mandatory profit cap on energy producing companies, including solar. Then came the passage of a law that puts a tax on the collection of solar energy, threatening substantial fines for anyone who doesn’t pay up. Home solar producers are especially hard hit by a surtax of 6 cents per Kilowatt of solar energy produced.

While the action in Spain is easily, but perhaps somewhat superficially, explained as the effects of a financial emergency that needed urgent handling under substantial pressure from creditor banks, the US example cited above puts a slightly different slant on the development.

Might the energy incumbents in Spain have had – as do their cousins overseas – a hand in targeting innovative competition?

Forbes magazine, in an article titled Out Of Ideas And In Debt, Spain Sets Sights On Taxing The Sun seems to agree. It might just be that the established hydrocarbon-burning energy companies suggested that idea to some of the politicians they are lavishly funding.

There are laws in Europe prohibiting the formation of monopolies and cartels, seeking to dismantle existing ones. But those laws and their enforcement never seem to be agile enough to actually serve the purpose.

It is true that concentration of power in one company is sometimes counteracted, but it is still going on in many fields, and there is no mechanism that catches the concentration of lobbying power and therefore influence on lawmakers, by large companies with an interest in eliminating decentralization and competition…

Perhaps those laws granting de-facto monopolies like in telecommunications and energy production, need to be reviewed to ensure competition can flourish and innovation can actually happen.